#WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has nominated Lt. Gen. Douglas Schiess for promotion to four-star general and selected him to become the next chief of space operations, positioning a career operator to lead the U.S. military’s youngest service as it shifts toward more contested space missions.

#NASA to increase value of CLPS contract to support surge of lunar lander missions . #WASHINGTON — NASA is planning to increase the total value of a contract for robotic lunar lander missions to support a proposed surge in flights for the agency’s moon base plans.

In an April 27 procurement filing, NASA said it was planning to increase the maximum value of its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contract from $2.6 billion to $4.2 billion.

The CLPS contract includes 13 companies that are eligible to compete for task orders for specific missions. The current CLPS contract expires in 2028, with planning underway for a follow-on contract, called CLPS 2.0.

NASA has awarded task orders whose combined value is less than $2 billion to date, and with the recent pace of about two task orders a year, would have only come close to the contract ceiling in 2028. The large increase, though, suggests NASA is planning to award more missions or more valuable missions over the next two years.

Asked about the filing during an April 29 panel session at the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium spring meeting, Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said he was not familiar with the document but that the agency expected to buy more CLPS missions.

“We’re looking into opportunities to buy into that ramp of demand for the very short term even as we work on issuing the CLPS 2.0 contract competition,” he said. “We have to start ramping now into this higher cadence, with a target of monthly landings, to bring some of the things to the surface very, very soon for Moon Base.”

At NASA’s “Ignition” event March 24, the agency outlined plans to develop a lunar base, simply called Moon Base, and with it a sharp increase in the number of robotic lunar landings. That included nine landings in 2027 and 10 in 2028.

That would be a sharp increase from current flight rates under the CLPS program. There were two lander missions in 2025, one by Firefly Aerospace and the other by Intuitive Machines. NASA is projecting up to four lander missions in 2026, by Astrobotic, Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines, although the charts shown at the Ignition event showed only two landings projected for the year.

That sharp increase has generated skepticism about NASA’s plans within industry, given recent flight rates and the time needed to develop a lander. NASA announced at Ignition a new CLPS award to Intuitive Machines, called IM-5, but that mission is not projected to launch until 2030.

Representatives of CLPS companies said on the panel that they can increase lander production but did not explicitly commit to the production rates needed to meet NASA’s projections.

“We’ve heard the call. We know this is NASA’s initiative, and we want to do more and more,” said Farah Zuberi, director of spacecraft mission management at Firefly. She noted her company now has three landers in production — Blue Ghosts 2, 3 and 4 — and has added new clean room space to support up to eight spacecraft at a time.

“There’s a lot of creative solutions that we can come up with,” she said. “Having that signal is really important. We know that this is coming. We can set ourselves up for success.”

Blue Origin is finishing testing of its first Blue Moon Mark 1 lander, called Endurance, at its Florida factory after performing thermal vacuum tests at Johnson Space Center, said Eddie Seyffert, director of civil space at the company. It is also manufacturing components for the second Mark 1 lander, which the company plans to use for NASA’s VIPER rover in 2027.

That work is done at Blue Origin’s Lunar Plant 1 factory, with 190,000 square feet of space “dedicated to making lunar landers to answer NASA’s call,” he said. “We’re excited about the challenge, and we want to show our stuff.”

Dan Hendrickson, vice president of business development at Astrobotic, said his company has already scaled up facilities to meet demand for its original CLPS mission. “We’ve got the basic DNA and roadmap” to meet higher demand, he said. “We’re starting from a place in which we have facilities that were intended to have multiple landers in development.”

One key issue is the supply chain for lander components, said Ben Bussey, chief scientist at Intuitive Machines. “The key, if you’re trying to ramp that up to multiple missions per year, is knowing you’ve got a supply chain that can do it in time, or bring things in-house,” he said.

He added that, on early CLPS missions, each lander was “slightly bespoke,” modified to meet the needs of its payloads. That’s less likely to be the case as flight rates increase. “I think you’ll see some form of standardization.”

“Going to build-to-print landers is maybe the response to the signal” from NASA’s Ignition plans, said Seyffert. “We’re going to build-to-print dozens of landers to help NASA achieve its goals.”

Turning moon ice into drinking water: A Canadian company’s challenge. As the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) moves towards establishing a permanent presence on the moon, a Canadian company is hoping to solve one of the biggest challenges for astronauts in deep space – accessing drinkable water.

The Canadian Strategic Missions Corporation (CSMC) was recently awarded $400,000 in grant funding after it won the Aqualunar Challenge, led by the Canadian Space Agency in partnership with Impact Canada.

The challenge aimed to identify innovative companies that could develop technologies “to purify moon water for human deep-space missions.”

CSMC was awarded the grand prize last month for its “LunaPure” technology, which the company says offers a sustainable and low-maintenance system to purify water trapped in the form of ice in the moon’s polar regions.

Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen and Artemis II crew set to meet Trump

#NASA’s #Artemis II capsule returned to Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday, almost a month after blasting off on humanity’s first lunar trip in more than a half-century.

Following its splashdown in the Pacific on April 10, the Orion capsule was trucked from San Diego to Cape Canaveral. Engineers will examine the capsule’s heat shield in more detail along with everything else in preparation for next year’s Artemis III docking demo in orbit around Earth. The capsule’s electronic boxes will be removed and recycled, along with research equipment.

The capsule, dubbed Integrity by its U.S.-Canadian crew, carried astronauts deeper into space than humans have ever traveled before. Aside from a finicky toilet, the capsule appeared to perform well during the nearly 10-day voyage, according to NASA.

Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canada’s Jeremy Hansen are finally getting a break after medical exams and other tests that followed their mission.

“Been waiting for this moment,” Wiseman said via X late last week, posting a video of himself relaxing on the beach. “There is a lot in my head that I must process and very little has to do with leaving the planet. Today is my first step. I have never in my life felt peace like this.”

Until Artemis II, astronauts had not flown to the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.

Artemis III will feature a fresh capsule and crew. They will remain in orbit around Earth for docking exercises with lunar landers still in development by SpaceX and Blue Origin. That will set the stage for a moon landing by two new astronauts as early as 2028.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Marcia Dunn, The Associated Press

#Voyager 1 shuts off instrument to buy time before ‘Big Bang’ fix to extend the mission, #NASA sent a command on April 17 to deactivate the spacecraft’s Low-energy Charged Particles experiment, or LECP, in the hopes of saving power as Voyager 1 journeys farther from Earth by the day, according to the agency. The same instrument, which measures the structure of the space between stars, was turned off on Voyager 1’s twin, Voyager 2, in March 2025.

The probes launched weeks apart in 1977, each outfitted with a suite of 10 science instruments intended to aid their flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 1 is currently about 25.40 billion kilometres (16 billion miles) from Earth, while Voyager 2 is roughly 21.35 billion kilometres (13 billion miles) away.

They are the only active spacecraft beyond the #heliosphere, the sun’s bubble of magnetic fields and particles that extends well beyond the orbit of Pluto. Keeping the probes operating far longer than their expected lifespan of five years has meant shutting down different instruments over time to preserve each spacecraft’s limited power supply.

“While shutting down a science instrument is not anybody’s preference, it is the best option available,” said Kareem Badaruddin, Voyager mission manager at #NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

“Voyager 1 still has two remaining operating science instruments — one that listens to plasma waves and one that measures magnetic fields. They are still working great, sending back data from a region of space no other human-made craft has ever explored. The team remains focused on keeping both Voyagers going for as long as possible.”

Three functioning science instruments remain on Voyager 2.

Engineers hope the latest sacrificial move can keep Voyager 1 operating long enough for the team to potentially roll out an upgrade, nicknamed “the Big Bang,” that could allow the record-breaking probe to continue exploring deeper into space — and perhaps even restart some of its science instruments.
Teeing up the ‘Big Bang’ fix

Both Voyager probes run on radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or devices that convert the heat provided by decaying plutonium into electricity. Since the probes began flying nearly half a century ago, they have been losing an estimated 4 watts of power per year.

Managing the slow but steady power drain pushes engineers into a high-stakes balancing act. Turning off instruments and heaters in the frigid temperatures of interstellar space risks chilling the probes beyond repair. If the fuel lines freeze, the spacecraft would lose the ability to keep their antennas pointed toward Earth, and NASA teams would lose contact with them — effectively ending the missions.

Engineers believe that shutting down the majority of the Low-energy Charged Particles experiment will enable Voyager 1 to keep flying with two functional instruments for about one year. Extending the life of the mission for that long could bring Voyager 1 to its 50-year anniversary, a deadline that’s setting the stage for one of the team’s most enterprising steps yet.

The team will attempt to make a big swap on the Voyager probes, turning off some powered devices while turning on alternatives that draw less power — maintaining that balance of keeping each spacecraft warm while continuing to capture scientific data.

This “Big Bang” would occur all at once, for one spacecraft at a time. Voyager 2, which has a bit more power and is relatively closer to Earth, will initially serve as a test subject during May and June.

If the Big Bang is successful on Voyager 2, the team will attempt the same maneuver on Voyager 1 in July — and if that works, the Low-energy Charged Particles experiment may get a second chance to continue its crucial collection of data in interstellar space.

“With LECP we discovered properties and effects of cosmic rays and solar particles, and ‘sensed’ the changes in the region around us that determined when Voyager had crossed from the solar system into interstellar space,” wrote Matt Hill, principal investigator for the instrument at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, in an email.

“We hold out hope that the Voyager engineers’ latest plan will be able to power up LECP on Voyager 1 again, to let us continue to learn whatever surprises await Voyager in these distant regions of space,” he added. “They have a good track record of seeming to perform miracles that stretch the remaining power supply, but eventually this streak will end.”
An unexpected dip in power

During a scheduled roll maneuver on February 27, the mission team noticed that Voyager 1’s power levels dropped unexpectedly. The spacecraft routinely executes such maneuvers to calibrate its magnetometer instrument, which measures magnetic fields and environments in interstellar space.

If Voyager 1’s power levels dropped any lower, such a decrease would trigger an autonomous failsafe called the undervoltage fault protection system. The system would shut down components on Voyager, and recovering anything that was powered down during the automatic process would require a lengthy and risky recovery effort by engineers on the ground.

“I think of fault protection as a safety net for a trapeze artist — it is there but really the trapeze artist should never let go of the trapeze,” Badaruddin said. “Fault protection puts the spacecraft in a safe state, but we must recover from it and ‘get back on the trapeze.’”

Fault protection also temporarily halts any transmission of science data from Voyager to Earth and adds the risk that science instruments may not properly turn back on, he said.

Mission engineers were ready to act and consulted a list they had compiled along with the science team years before about the order in which they wanted to shut down various instruments, while ensuring Voyager 1 could still carry out a viable science mission.

The Low-energy Charged Particles experiment was at the top of the list. For nearly 49 years, the instrument has measured charged particles like ions, electrons and cosmic rays coming from our solar system as well as the Milky Way galaxy more broadly. The measurements have provided unprecedented data about regions of varying density beyond the heliosphere.

The subsystems of the instrument include a telescope and magnetospheric particle analyzer, which have a 360-degree view, thanks to a rotating platform powered by a stepper motor.

That tiny motor, which only uses 0.5 watts, will remain turned on — which means the instrument itself could be revived in the future if there is enough power.

On Earth, the stepper motor was tested to about 250,000 steps, enough to operate during Voyager 1’s flybys of Jupiter and Saturn over a four-year span.

“The stepper has worked flawlessly for nearly 49 years and over 8.5 million steps,” wrote Stamatios Krimigis, principal investigator for the instrument at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, in an email. “And, amazingly, it continued to step after we turned-off the LECP supplemental heater to save power, and its temperature dropped to –62 degrees Centigrade. This is the stuff that dreams are made of!”

By Ashley Strickland, CNN

A news release from the #Canadian Space Agency says this will be Kutryk’s first space mission.

During his mission, the Canadian Space Agency says he will conduct several international and Canadian science experiments, many focusing on health-related research and space station maintenance and operations activities.

#Kutryk is expected to launch no earlier than mid-September 2026 from Florida, along with #NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov.

NASA says the flight is the 13th crew rotation with SpaceX to the space station as part of its Commercial Crew Program.

Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen returned from a 10-day lunar flyby mission earlier this month.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 23, 2026.

Catherine Morrison, The Canadian Press

Hybridizing #nuclear command, control and communications systems puts space infrastructure at risk. Space based nuclear command, control and communications (#NC3) systems were developed as highly classified and sovereign systems, insulated from external influence and designed to survive in the most extreme circumstances. Constructed in the 1960s, the systems made sure that states were able to reliably identify and retaliate against threats, maintaining deterrence stability.

#WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Force awarded contracts to data analytics firms Leidos and MapLarge to support what the military calls battle management and command and control — the process of understanding what is happening in orbit, deciding what it means and directing a response.

Blue Origin launches rocket with used booster for first time. Blue Origin, the U.S. space company of #Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, on Sunday successfully reused and recovered a booster for its New Glenn rocket, confirming its mastery of a technical feat that could boost its launch cadence and expand its rivalry with SpaceX.

But the uncrewed mission also suffered a partial setback: the satellite carried into space by the rocket did not settle into the right orbit.

The company has launched the New Glenn twice before, but only with new rocket boosters. It has previously launched its smaller New Shepard rocket, primarily used for suborbital space tourism, with reused components in a less technically challenging operation.

The novel recycling approach comes amid fierce competition between Bezos’s firm and fellow tech titan Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has also recovered a booster from a launched rocket.

The New Glenn rocket, standing at 98 meters (321 feet) tall, lifted off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral with its reused booster at about 7:25 a.m. (11:25 GMT) carrying a communications satellite for the company AST SpaceMobile.

After liftoff, the rocket’s two stages separated, with the upper stage continuing its journey carrying the satellite into space. Its booster successfully landed on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean about nine minutes and 30 seconds after takeoff.

Blue Origin said later in a statement on X that the satellite turned on properly but was placed in “an off-nominal orbit.” The gravity of this error was not immediately known. The company said it was assessing the mishap.

In November, Blue Origin recovered a New Glenn booster for the first time, succeeding in the complex technical challenge that culminated with a controlled vertical landing on a floating platform.

A previous attempt in January 2025 to recover the booster was unsuccessful after its engines failed to reignite during descent.

The booster used in Sunday’s launch was refurbished after its previous flight. For this first reuse, the company replaced all of its engines and made several other modifications.

The New Glenn is at the heart of Bezos’s space ambitions as he competes with Musk in NASA’s Artemis lunar program, with their companies both developing lunar landers for the US space agency.

The United States is doubling down on efforts to return astronauts to the surface of the Moon in 2028, before the end of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term and a deadline set by Chinese rivals.